Over to Candleford, and Candleford Green.
NB: In addition to writing the Preface for a new, beautiful, clothbound edition of Flora Thompson’s Lark Rise for Slightly Foxed (further below) I was also commissioned to write the preface to the second and third combined part of the Slightly Foxed Lark Rise to Candleford Trilogy, as a ‘back up,’ to the author, who, due to personal circumstances, may have not been able to do so. She was able, so my preface to the companion to the first, appears here instead.
“The small scene, so commonplace and yet so lovely, delighted her. It was so near the homes of men and yet so far removed from their thoughts. The fresh green moss, the glistening ivy, and the reddish twigs with their sparkling drops seemed to have been made for her alone and the hurrying, foam-flecked water seemed to have some message for her … and deeper down, beneath the surface of her being, was the feeling, rather than the knowledge, that her life’s deepest joys would be found in such scenes as this.“
The semi-autobiographical trilogy of Lark Rise begins in the poor, rural hamlet of that name, charting the early life of Flora Thompson (Laura) and her community at the point where social and political change and the advancement of transport, communication and mechanisation, were to alter life and landscape forever. Flora continues to focus her delightfully detailed and powerfully local eye on the domestic and working details of village and small town life, as she herself moves Over to Candleford and to Candleford Green. As before, she brings the people, their employment, leisure time and outlook, richly to life, and all among the vividly described Oxfordshire countryside of woods, streams, farmed fields, village greens, waysides and heaths. The books are interlaced with exquisite nature-writing, on a more complete countryside of abundant wildlife we barely recognise today.
Like spring, change comes to Lark Rise at walking pace – and, to a certain extent, walks around it; in the hamlet, everyone is of one class and poor; all equal, knowing their place and keeping it. It is an unconscious act of poignancy when Laura and her little brother Edmund make the first journey of many, alone on foot, to the small town of Candleford, to visit ‘the cousins.’ This generation are literally beginning to walk away from hamlet life and all it represents. Staying with ‘the cousins’ is a holiday from a life of ordinary hardship, albeit one where they knew ‘the now lost secret of being happy on little.’
It soon becomes clear to Laura’s mother, that her daughter, with her poor sewing, distracted nursemaiding and ‘timewasting’ passions of reading and writing, is not cut out for the life expected of daughters of the hamlet. Laura falls into a depression, seemingly growing up in a world that has no use for her. It is being alone in nature, soothed, smoothed and lifted by it, that brings her round; a profound feeling and need that we acknowledge more readily today.
As we follow Laura to employment and independence in a village, we see her walking from the past, into her future and the future of such places, without quite leaving it behind. She strides ahead into her own narrative, looking forwards, but also steps over a stile to pick flowers, considers an aged neighbour’s life, or leans over a woodland stream as she goes. In a countryside that for Laura, needs to be appreciated alone, all is noted, all is marked and revelled in. She recalls days called ‘weather breeders’ that seem to advance the season; in spring, she sees the hazel catkins plumping and lengthening, and breathes in the smell of warming earth.
Laura finds a kindred spirit in her Uncle Tom, and they read companionably in his cobbler’s workshop, as ‘Bookworms Limited’ and the world of literature opens up further to her, under his influence. But it is an old friend of her mother’s, postmistress of Candleford Green and owner of the adjoining blacksmiths and wheelwrights business, Dorcas Lane (Mrs Whitton in real life) that changes the course of Laura’s life, in a thoroughly modern way.
Miss Lane is a delightfully enigmatic character, a leader of a small workforce and household of men, with a love for the past, respectability and a keen eye on the future. She is a business woman of brains and imagination who loved to keep abreast of developments in science, communication and international relationships. She reads Darwin and keeps a strict ‘afternoon bavour’ of tea for the men. Flora remarks ‘had she lived later she must have made her mark in the world, for she had the quick, unerring grasp of a situation … but there were few openings for women in those days, especially for those born in small country villages.’
Laura thrives at the Post Office, but is again assailed by the feeling ‘something is missing.’ In a world where women spent 9/10ths of their time indoors, she misses the woods, fields and wayside. It is an ache I know only too well. The opportunity of a postal round completes her happiness. It is while on her round she meets gamekeeper Philip White, who decides, in the contemporary way, that 16-yr old Laura is ‘his girl.’ But, perhaps inspired by her employer, Laura is set on a different path. More than once, she ‘dares to be a Daniel’ and rejects what is expected of her; admitting ‘she never did wish to do what everybody else was doing.’ Laura is part of change. The mention of charity teas in aid of ‘heathens’ and the Oscar Wilde case (compounded in the village by an attack on two former soldiers living together) is viewed, as if from a distance; as if these views, already, were not hers. She makes new friends, better off than she, but that want change too. They are the ‘fin de siècle’ generation that would change so much.
By 1898 Flora Thompson was running a sub post-office at Grayshott, Hampshire, and was able to rent her own room, take long walks and write. There, she encountered a particularly artistic community over her Post Office counter: her customers included Arthur Conan Doyle, George Bernard Shaw and friends.
Flora married fellow postal worker, John Thompson in 1903, and they had three children, moving first to Bournemouth, then Liphook in Hampshire, close to her beloved Grayshott . Flora managed still, to write and walk alone, repeating the trick she first learnt on her Post Office rounds – walking and being outdoors in nature was still not a luxury open to her – unless she made it part of her work. A 20-mile walk was nothing to her and happily, necessary for her writing and earning power. I like that she wrote, determinedly and between the gaps of everything else, as I have always done – and managed to marry her two loves together, nature, and writing. She published nature notes in The Catholic Fireside and wrote about wild creatures, otter hunting and the destruction of hedgerows in The Peverel Papers and published a volume of poetry, Bog-Myrtle and Peat, in 1921.
With this trilogy, against the odds, yet flavoured by them, Flora moves through her rural hamlet, village, and on; marking time, dignifying and gifting a lasting record of the end of a long era to those people and their endeavours, that would not otherwise have any voice at all.
Lark Rise
(being the first part of the Lark Rise to Candleford Trilogy)
Preface for a new edition, by Nicola Chester, published by Slightly Foxed, The Real Reader’s Quarterly.
Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 73 © Nicola Chester 2022 This article also appeared as a preface to Slightly Foxed Edition No. 58: Lark Rise
On Juniper Hill
‘Against the billowing gold of the fields the hedges stood dark, solid and dew-sleeked. There were night scents of wheat-straw and flowers … There is both beauty and bread and the seeds of bread for future generations’.
Flora Thompson’s Lark Rise has always felt like home. A romantic notion, perhaps, from someone brought up in the 1970s and ’80s, rather than a century ago, as Flora was. I first read it when I was 13, then again in my twenties, and once more recently, this time as a mother, looking back on my own childhood but also on that of my children, as the oldest two began to make their way into the world, away from the rural hamlet and tenanted ex-farmworker’s cottage they’ve grown up in. With the passing of time that feeling of homecoming has only grown stronger.
It is, of course, very unusual that a rural, working-class woman, born the eldest of a large family in 1876 and growing up poor and largely self-educated, should have had anything published, let alone such a lyrical, yet unsentimental account of country life. But its unlikely origins make it all the more illuminating and genuine. Part lightly disguised memoir, part nature writing, Lark Rise is an honest, pragmatic, joyful and, at times, political record of Flora’s childhood in the 1880s, and it still has resonance today.
Though Flora, whom she calls Laura in the book, was very much of her community (the tiny hamlet of Juniper Hill, in north-east Oxfordshire), she was set apart from it too, much like the rural poet John Clare. Her father, initially a stonemason, had ambitions for his craft and family and held radical socialist views in a community of farmworkers amongst whom he did not intend to remain. Their rented ‘end house’ had its back to the other cottages, looking outwards across the fields. But Flora’s father remained a bricklayer, a ‘lost and thwarted man’, and the growing family stayed poor.
Formerly a rectory nursemaid, Flora’s mother loved storytelling, but reading for pleasure was considered an idle indulgence, and above the station of those in the hamlet. An early and then voracious reader, Flora herself was seldom seen without a book. Though she was mocked by her peers, Flora loved to read and to wander the fields and woods alone – and that was something I identified with. At each of the five village primary schools I went to, I was accused of thinking myself ‘posh’ for reading. And even now, as a librarian in a rural secondary school, I find reading is viewed in much the same way by some parents, who feel their children should be helping at home, and by some children, who’d rather be out in the fields.
Flora developed a forensic, reverent and delighted naturalist’s eye that she applied to both the domestic particulars of daily life – cooking, washdays and housework – and to the work that went on in the fields around the hamlet. That eye served her well as a writer. She revels in the local dialect, playing on the ‘grinsard’ or greensward of the grass verges and knowing all the flowers and ‘craturs’ living there, and while she is sometimes wistful in noting the passing of time, she is neither sentimental nor nostalgic. She records how home life, characters, entertainment and employment were all driven by the seasons and by the farming year, and she writes of pleasure, hard work, conflict and resolve.
While what Laurie Lee called ‘a thousand years’ of rural life was coming to an end, communities like Lark Rise were still struggling with the repercussions of enclosure, where common land (and the age-old opportunity for self-sufficiency) was fenced off and denied them. Some of the hamlet’s houses, like Old Sally’s, had been built ‘before the open heath had been cut up into fenced fields and the newer houses had been built to accommodate the labourers who came to work in them’. Flora remembers Old Sally’s fondly. Well into the next century, a whiff of any combination of drying herbs, apples, onions, malt, hops or a ‘dash of soapsuds’ took her straight back to her childhood. And she notes that ‘Country people had not been so poor when Sally was a girl, or their prospects so hopeless.’ Flora’s parents, on the other hand, were the ‘besieged generation . . . and the hamlet’s chief assailant was Want’.
Flora does not romanticize or ennoble the poverty of Lark Rise but simply records it. ‘Men afield’, still hungry after a breakfast of bread and lard, might pare and gnaw a turnip pulled from the fields or ‘even try a bit of the cattle’s oilcake’. When I was a child, we used to pass close by Juniper Hill on our way to see my Northamptonshire nan. The daughter of an itinerant agricultural labourer, she told me how home and income could so easily be lost then. Her father was followed home one day after pulling a mangold (grown as sheep’s fodder) from the ground to supplement a meagre pot at Dropshort Cottage. Confronted at the door by the farmer, her father grew angry and threw the mangold (a substantial root vegetable) at his retreating employer and landlord’s head. It connected, and both cottage and job were lost in an instant (if satisfyingly so).
Flora recalls too the strength afforded by community cohesion: ‘The women wished above all things to be on good terms with their neighbours.’ She details a fascinating system of respectful borrowing (a spoonful of tea or the heel of a loaf to tide a household over until pay day, when it would be repaid) and the appearance of ‘The Box’, containing a baby’s layette that was shared around after each new birth. Most families in the hamlet kept a pig, snug against their outer cottage walls, and they were generous around the time of each pig-killing. Bread was a ‘heavy item’ on the purse, so spilled grains of corn were ‘leazed’ at harvest time for flour, and the community had its ‘knowledge of herbs’, made jams, jellies and wine from the hedgerows, cured bacon and ham, brewed beer and grew vegetables in their small allotments and gardens.
They also knew, Flora notes, ‘the now lost secret of being happy on little’. Rude health and stoicism were a source of pride, and all repeated the mantra ‘I didn’t flinch’, whether facing a hard day’s work on an empty stomach or the arrival of another baby. Along with the division of labour, the women had their tea hour and gossip, the men their pub, politics and singing. Flora records the games, gaiety and celebrations of May Day, Harvest Home and Christmas, and the last echoes of country songs, ballads and game rhymes.
The gradual creep of mechanization, industrialization, universal suffrage, compulsory schooling, better transport and communications and, eventually, the First World War, all conspired to alter country life forever, for good and bad. In Lark Rise there was both a resistance to and wariness of change (might things become worse, as they had before?) and an embracing of it, in the hope of a more comfortable life in the future. This largely self-governing community wasn’t closed to the changes gathering pace outside, and this was poignantly illustrated by the women’s attempts to be fashionable on slender means and cast-offs. For, as they said, ‘You don’t want to be poor and look poor, too.’
In 1884, 2 million agricultural labourers were given the vote and Laura observes the rise of differing politics in the hamlet. Life still felt feudal, but the desire to rent a cottage, and not be tied to one through work ‘at Master’s bidding’, was a bid for a tenanted freedom that even now I recognize, having myself moved from tied to tenanted accommodation on big country estates.
Sympathies and intolerances swung about, before settling on a kind of acceptance with the shrugged words, ‘but ’tis natur’. In a time of great social reform, some of the prejudices held by an isolated community were showing signs of shifting, though anybody living more than five miles away was still regarded as a ‘furriner’, and the younger married men began to share some of the home labour or ‘’ooman’s work’. Then too, though the dreaded new school inspectors didn’t hide their contempt for the ‘slow wits’ of country children, Flora saw their intelligence, and recorded how a new teacher ‘taught them for the future, not the past . . . poor people’s souls were as good, and as capable of cultivation and greatness’.
Flora began writing Lark Rise more than half a lifetime later and it was published in 1939, on the eve of the Second World War. It was an instant success, perhaps because it appealed to readers hankering after simpler times, when the countryside and its traditions had not yet been ravaged by change, when resilience and self-reliance brought people through hardship.
She was encouraged to write more, and two sequels, Over to Candleford and Candleford Green, followed in 1941 and 1943. They chart her move from hamlet to village to small market town, via a career as an assistant post mistress, and mirror the changes taking place in the rural working life she was leaving behind. Yet in her mind Flora never left Lark Rise entirely – and nor have I. We seem always to be walking away, distracted by the wayside flowers, but casting lingering last looks over our shoulders even as we move inexorably forwards.
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Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader’s Quarterly. The independent-minded quarterly that combines good looks, good writing and a personal approach, Slightly Foxed introduces its readers to books that are no longer new and fashionable but have lasting appeal. Good-humoured, unpretentious and a bit eccentric, it’s more like a well-read friend than a literary magazine. Single issues from £12; annual subscriptions from £48. For more information please visit www.foxedquarterly.com
nicola chester 